King Rat Revisited: Talking Trash With China Miéville
- Jonathan Wright -
China Miéville’s first novel, King Rat (1998), is sometimes seen as a prequel to the main event, even a piece of juvenilia compared to his other novels. It’s a reading that sees Miéville’s literary life as beginning in earnest with Perdido Street Station (2001), the first of his Bas-Lag novels, set texts for anyone interested in what’s been dubbed the New Weird.
This is curious – because it’s not as if, as JG Ballard famously did with his self-styled “hackwork” novel The Wind From Nowhere, Miéville has disavowed King Rat. Sure, it’s a strange book, a retelling of the Pied Piper story rooted in London’s 1990s dance club culture, but it’s suffused with energy and wit. And rather than being some kind of outlier, it shows how what Miéville calls his “fidelity to my own obsessions” has, as that phrase suggests, been constant from the very beginning of his career.
Which is another way of saying King Rat is in key respects a book about rubbish, trash, the “garbage sublime” written by a man who finds poetry in carrier bags being blown by the breeze. “When there’s soft wind, they roll along the floor like something animated, like jelly fish,” he says, an incongruous comment considering we meet for coffee in the polished environs of the redeveloped St Pancras Station.
So where did this love of trash spring from? As a child, Miéville remembers his mother giving him a book promoting environmentalism, Battle For Planet Earth. He’s still got it. “[It has] – and I think this book was really key for me – very beautiful, arty shots of rubbish tips and industrial decay and sumps full of oil, because it was all about the degradation of planet Earth,” he says. “And I remember very clearly having a conversation with my mum and not having the language to say to her what I wanted, which was, ‘I know that I’m being shown these pictures to point out how awful they are, but I think they’re beautiful.’”
That’s not to say trash features in King Rat as explicitly as it does in Miéville’s YA book Un Lun Dun (2007), with its dangerously animate rubbish. Instead, it’s a theme filtered through the notion of bricolage, creating art from found objects. More specifically still, King Rat is a novel saturated in the sonic bricolage of sampling employed in drum’n’bass and jungle, the closely linked, deep-bass-heavy and frenetic-beats-driven musics that evolved out of the 1980s rave scene.
“The fact that you could have music that was, I think and still think, extraordinarily avant-garde and experimental, not even pop surrealism, but pop dada for fuck’s sake, and it would fill a dancefloor, that’s fucking amazing,” Miéville says.
The novel’s thumping soundtrack will already have been imagined by any reader who’s got even a passing familiarity with Goldie’s pre-celebrity career, but what’s less familiar is how the ideas here developed. Initially, Miéville had no intention of writing about a centuries-long feud between the fallen king of the rats and a vermin hunter from Hamelin.
“I wanted to write a werewolf novel, I was interested in werewolves, still am, I mean who’s not?” he says. Miéville’s distinct take on lycanthropes played off them being “very rural.” How would such creatures cope in an urban environment? “[They relate] to the city as a forest, so this was a forest narrative but set in the city, London specifically,” he says.
What if one of the werewolves saw the capital not as a forest, but as a jungle? The connection to the music was made. “It became a supernatural thriller set very much around this particular drum’n’bass night,” Miéville says. “And then the werewolves started to ebb. I started to push that thematic of the jungle up and I became more interested in the specifics of the form of the music as opposed to simply the name.”
Instead of imagining lycanthropes on a night out, Miéville became fascinated by what he calls the “hypnagogic” qualities of clubs, a reference to a term used by French scholar and doctor Alfred Maury (1817-92) to describe the transition from wakefulness into sleep. Another connection, with a story of a piper mesmerising rodents – helped along by childhood memories of a pantomime villain, King Rat himself, as played by Miéville’s improbably named music teacher, Mr Rainbow – suggested itself as Miéville rifled through “the heap of cultural debris” within his own memory. The music “veered the book.”
But perhaps it was a book always waiting to be veered because Miéville’s fascination with electronic music goes back to his school years. As a teenager, he loved industrial music, Ministry, Skinny Puppy, Einstürzende Neubauten and Consolidated, which in turn led him to rap and hip-hop – and in particular Public Enemy, who remain a key influence.
“I remember listening to Fear Of A Black Planet and the kind of unremitting anger and radicalism, the radical anger not just of the lyrics but it felt like the form, there was a relentlessness to it and I was very intoxicated by the politics of it,” he says. He was also drawn to electronic music’s “trash suturing,” the way sampling culture and hip-hop display “incredibly creative, militant disrespect” for their source material. “I found that intoxicating, I still do,” he says.
This intoxication is clear in King Rat’s pages. “There’s a point where one of the characters, Natasha [Karadjian], is described as making zombie music,” says Miéville, “and it’s very much this notion of taking a dead piece of music, a piece of beat, like a two-second snip of music and looping it and looping it and looping it so that it becomes this relentless zombie.”
To return to where we began, the obsessions of King Rat really aren’t so far from the books that have followed. Inspired by both real garbage and, it might be added, genre literature often dismissed as garbage, China Miéville has written a particular form of trash literature from the off – an altogether different matter from writing trashy books.
Digital Distribution in an Analogue World: MP3 Markets in Nouakchott, Mauritania
- Christopher Kirkley -
The country of Mauritania lies in the extreme west of Africa, between the desert and the sea. A landscape of vast and empty backlands, it is here that trans-Saharan trade thrived, a vital link between North Africa and the sub-Sahara. Once, merchants bartered in salt slabs and dried dates, but today, as digitisation has penetrated even the most remote corners of the world, the markets of Nouakchott have adapted an old model to a new commerce.
From the outside, West Africa’s largest mp3 market is fairly unremarkable. Nestled in between a few luxury hotels and in the shadow of the twin spires of an imposing mosque, the street side bustles with the ebb and flow of unregulated commerce. The theme is cellular. Young men gather in a large crowd, chargers trailing from their pockets as they haggle over the prices of used cellphones in various states of disrepair, while elderly turbaned vendors crouch in the shade of the building, leaning over rubber-banded stacks of SIM cards. Megaphones blast out the latest credit promotions and giveaways from the shops lining the street. Anxious store owners gaze over the crowd, hoping to catch the eye of a passer-by. It is between these shops that I find the entrance: a deceivingly small and narrow corridor that leads into the real market beyond, where a chaotic jumble of overlapping musics fills the air.
This market is made up of seemingly identical concrete rooms. In each room, rather bored-looking young men sit behind desktop computers, eyes glued to the screens. Every computer is attached to a pair of speakers, facing out into the marketplace, blaring songs at the loudest possible volumes in an arms’ race of sonic amplitude. There are no visible goods to speak of, but this is no conventional market. The products are the songs. The vendors are selling mp3s.
It functions similarly to iTunes or any download service, but most of West Africa is not on the internet, so the mp3 market has emerged as a physical construction. Indeed, wandering through the narrow aisles, there is a sensation that this is what the internet was supposed to feel like – the visions of a gritty cyberpunk future where you would jack in and be re-imagined into a realm of digital commerce.
The rooms are arranged by genre and
reflected by the ethnicity of the seller. Young Maurs in flowing draâs shuffle through playlists of jarring phased guitar, of Hassaniya wedding recordings and spaced-out Moroccan chaabi, while immigrants from Senegal host massive hard drives of low bit-rate mbalax. A stout vendor from Ivory Coast plays only coupé-décalé, the frenetic dance music from his country, while an old Tuareg man, his face obscured by a turban, plays grainy pentatonic recordings of the old rebellion. Songs are purchased for a small fee, around 40 ougiya per song, or roughly 14 cents. Suffice to say that none of the money goes back to the artists, though piracy is never mentioned. In the free-for-all of digital exchange, the market has created a supply from a demand, accepting a meagre payment for services rendered – not for the music, which everyone agrees is a valueless item. After all, it’s so easy to copy.
I’ve brought along a memory stick and quickly fill up the two gigabytes. My vendor is a Guinean rapper named LG. His room is plastered with glossy posters, Nigerian-made photomontages of American rappers, Bob Marley and Barack Obama. He’s running a battered Windows PC, the case cracked open to keep it from overheating. A myriad of cables sprout from the computer: USB connections, splitters, memory card readers and adapters. He attaches my USB flash drive, and immediately runs a virus scan on the drive, furiously clicking around the desktop, flicking through folders: Guinean rap, Pulaar guitar, Koranic recitations. He clicks through the tracks that sound out the speakers as we briefly listen. A staccato drumming and shouting. Click. A distorted electric guitar wailing. Click. A thumping bass and lyrics in a language I’ve never heard. Click. I give a nod, and he drops them onto my USB.
After I’ve copied and filled the flash drive, I pay LG for the sum of the songs. In addition to the collections, he adds a couple of his own tracks, homemade hip-hop, recorded right here on the same computer. His gritty rap lyrics accompany a Kanye West instrumental ripped from YouTube. Before I leave, I ask him about his desktop wallpaper – a clearly Photoshopped montage of LG standing alongside a young woman. His arm is draped over her shoulder. “Who’s that?” I ask, and he flashes a smile. “That’s me, and that’s Rihanna.”
While LG can’t say for certain when the marketplace began to deal in mp3s, the digital music revolution can be traced back to the rise of the cellular phone. In West Africa and across much of the continent, the past few years have seen a rapid increase in computing availability. A steady trickle of used PCs from Europe led to cyber cafés springing up on every corner. Nevertheless, the personal computer has remained unaffordable to most people.
Phones, by contrast, are cheap. In 2007, Chinese cellphones began to flood the market. While most of these phones were not equipped for internet access, they featured memory card inputs, built-in cameras, and speakers capable of playing music. Miniature computers, these new-generation cellphones not only created huge shifts in communication, but fostered in an era of digitisation. Soon, nearly everyone was habitually carrying a personal digital device that, among other things, housed a music collection.
In addition to storing and playing music, the average West African cellphone can transfer songs to other phones via wireless Bluetooth transfers. The transformative power of the technology has integrated into the most mundane and remote situations. Even in far-flung desert villages, outside the reach of cellphone towers, today’s youth gather in the evenings around the tiny glow of cellphone screens browsing through soundtracks of tinny music. The novel technology allows literal peer-to-peer transfer.
If a song peaks some interest, an exchange can be initiated with minimal effort, and a copy is made onto another cellphone. This exchange, combined with mobility of individuals, has created a network of music stretching across the continent. Indeed, the entire map of West Africa can be read as a metaphoric internet, a network of roads with buses filled with cellphones blaring as the fibre-optic cables, and the capitals and trans-Saharan stopovers with their mp3 markets as hubs and nodes of exchange.
While much of the conversation in the industrialised world has focused on music piracy and way to address the free for all of music exchange, the West African mp3 market doesn’t offer a solution, but a new way of understanding music – a reminder that digital ‘objects’ such as recorded music do not necessarily have a price tag attached to them. In the past few years, digitisation has been rapidly adopted with little reclamation from artists.
Surprisingly, the exchange and unregulated sale of mp3s does not pose the same moral problems as it does in the West – in fact, it calls into question the Western-held notion of music piracy. As record companies lament the decline of an industry and try to invent new ways to control exchange, the West African music landscape harbours no such notions of recorded music. It is performance that has a long tradition, stretching back to the ancient times, with family praise singers recounting histories, compensated by their patrons. Today’s professional musicians rely on paid performances, weddings in which they are literally showered in bills. The trading and exchange of music is considered free promotion.
With no central institution dictating popular music, the digital music circulating throughout the network of cellphone and mp3 markets ranges from pop hits to obscure home recordings. Popularity is owed to the virus-like quality of songs to travel from cellphone to cellphone. It is a Darwinian musical landscape, where survival is dictated by personal choice and the music’s quality.
In the burgeoning landscape of technological innovations and hyper-productivity, the mp3 network contains all manner of new creations and genres, from autotuned Tuareg guitar to political hip-hop anthems penned by teenagers in cyber cafés – all alongside the latest Western pop. This ability for anyone to share their creations without the backing of a multi-billion dollar record industry echoes many of the sentiments of an old utopian vision of the internet, a system of networks that would usher in true technological egalitarianism. Few would have imagined such a system would arise in the Saharan desert.
How Long ’Til Black Future Month? The Toxins of Speculative Fiction, and the Antidote that is Janelle Monáe
- NK Jemisin -
Scene: I’m watching reruns of an old kids’ cartoon I used to love: The Jetsons. I grew up wanting to take a flying car to school because of this show. It’s the 21st century and there are no flying cars. What the hell is up with that? So disappointing.
But I watch the show now, as an adult, and I notice something: there’s nobody even slightly brown in the Jetsons’ world. Even the family android sounds white. This is supposed to be the real world’s future, right? Albeit in silly, humorous form. Thing is, not-white-people make up most of the world’s population, now as well as back in the 1960s when the show was created. So what happened to all those people, in the minds of this show’s creators? Are they down beneath the clouds, where the Jetsons never go? Was there an apocalypse, or maybe a pogrom? Was there a memo?
I’m watching The Jetsons, and it’s creeping me right the fuck out.
Counterscene: I’m listening to Violet Stars Happy Hunting! Janelle Monáe’s singing about herself as an android being hunted for daring to fall in love with a human man. There’s a whole agency devoted to tracking down androids who do this – apparently it happens a lot. The hunters have a few dialogue lines in which they speak with an obvious African-American dialect, as they gleefully contemplate ripping out her “cybersoul” with a chainsaw. The whole thing seems awfully inefficient; why they don’t just program the androids not to fall in love, I don’t know. The Jetsons’ android certainly seemed happy enough with her lot. Maybe servants work harder if they’re left the illusion of choice? I’m probably over-thinking this.
Monáe’s future sounds hellish, at least for the robots. Yet it doesn’t scare me half as much as the Jetsons’ future did.
Where the Hell Are We? I’ve been consuming SF and fantasy since I was a child. Started with mythology and folklore, worked my way through the Golden Age greats, peppered this with Dungeons & Dragons and endless Star Wars emulations. My father
fed my habit by watching classic Twilight Zone and Star Trek episodes with me, every summer-holiday weeknight at two in the morning, Channel 11. I dreamed of going to Space Camp, though my family couldn’t afford it. I started writing about talking animals and the apocalypse at the ripe old age of eight and never stopped. If there’s anyone who was born and raised a geek, it’s me.
Yet even then I noticed that there was no one like me in most of my geekery. This was in the days before the first black female astronaut, Mae Jemison (no relation), and when the closest thing to non-white people that anyone saw in fantasy were orcs. There were a few notable examples that I can remember offhand: Ursula Le Guin’s Earthsea series, Clarke’s novel Childhood’s End. That was pretty much it.
My father tried to supplement these rare delicacies by introducing me to Afrofuturist staples. Parliament Funkadelic became my new (old) favourite band, and we both loved the indie film The Brother From Another Planet. Unfortunately these supplements just reinforced my sense of alienation. Why did I have to travel to the margins of speculative fiction to see anything of myself? Why was it easier to find aliens or unicorns than people of colour or realistic women?
Then I began to realise the exclusions I’d noticed were not just a matter of benign neglect. Robert E Howard wrote endless pulp stories set in fantastical Africa and Asia – and centred all of them on white men. Nebula and Hugo winner Samuel Delany, in his 1998 essay Racism And Science Fiction, shares his experience of having a story rejected by one of the most celebrated editors in the genre solely because the protagonist was black.
Adventure Rocketship! Let's All Go To The Science Fiction Disco Page 8